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On Thursday night my wife and I dined in Brooklyn with a couple who grew up near Ebbets Field. The woman lived on Franklin and went to a Catholic girls high school nearby. She started in the fall of 1957 and graduated in 1961 - almost the exact time when EF was vacant (Dodgers left after 1957 season; the demolition of the park began on February 23, 1960). The man graduated form Erasmus Hall High School in Barbra Streisand's class. His family stayed in the area until the 1970s. He, too, said there was a massive population displacement.

Then last night I met a guy who was an NYPD cop assigned to the 71 Precinct (the Ebbets Field pct) beginning in 1968.

I spoke with all three people at length about the area. What they said is that the area changed first in the late 1950s (the woman told me that it no longer was OK to walk home without several people with you from school and dances), and that by the mid 1960s safety had become a major factor, and whole apt buildings had been emptied of long time residents who fled to safer places.

The ex cop told me that while there were no momentos of EF in the 71 Pct station house, many "old timers" regaled the younger cops with EF stories and of how good the Dodgers were to the cops when the team played there.
He went on in detail about changes in the area that he noted (he grew up there) and said that Freddie Fitzsimmons bowling alley lasted for a few years after 1957, before it changed hands and then closed.

It would be interesting to hear the perspective of others who lived or visited the area where our favorite park was in the years before and after its demise.

Comment

Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from where I lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect Park. By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a convergence of all the tribes of Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish and the Italians, immigrants and their American children; oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront neighborhoods to the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean men who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest, places where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and had become Americans; and of course, all those black Americans, including men with gray hair who had waited for too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson walk on big league grass.

All of us were going to Ebbets Field.

(Pete Hamill on Ebbets Field)

(Photo from the cover of Ebbets Field: Brooklyn's Baseball Shrine by Joseph McCauley)
Thanks to Brooklyn14 for helping get this posted

Comment

Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from where I lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect Park. By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a convergence of all the tribes of Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish and the Italians, immigrants and their American children; oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront neighborhoods to the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean men who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest, places where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and had become Americans; and of course, all those black Americans, including men with gray hair who had waited for too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson walk on big league grass.

All of us were going to Ebbets Field.(Pete Hamill on Ebbets Field)

THAT is one of my favorite PETE pieces!

Pete was one of US, so everything he wrote about OUR DODGERS touched US!

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Here is a ticket stub from a night game at OUR Ebbets Field on Friday, April 22, 1955. For those who have never seen a ticket which was stamped (as this one is) and actually sold "with a restricted view" (most likely behind a post), take note. WE played the NY Giants and lost this game 5-4.